 It is a beautiful truth that all men
contain something of the artist in
them. And perhaps it is the case that
the greatest artists live and die, the
world and themselves alike ignorant
what they possess.
 I am a man who, sauntering along
without fully stopping, turns a
casual look upon you and then averts
his face, Leaving it to you to prove
and define it, Expecting the main
things from you.
 I think of few heroic actions, which
cannot be traced to the artistical
impulse. He who does great deeds,
does them from his innate
sensitiveness to moral beauty.
 A morning-glory at my window
satisfies me more than the
metaphysics of books.
 Born: May 31, 1819
West Hills, New York
Died: March 26, 1892
Camden, New Jersey
 Generally considered to be the most
important American poet of the
nineteenth century
 He wrote in free verse (not in
traditional poetic form), relying heavily
on the rhythms of common American
speech and melody
 Second of nine children, was a son of a
Quaker carpenter. Whitman's mother
was descended from Dutch farmers
 Whitman’s father knew and admired Thomas
Paine and was a liberal thinker; Walt was born
just 30 years after George Washington was born
 Family moved to the growing urban center of the
world when he was four: Brooklyn
 Favorite childhood story was when General
Lafayette picked young Walt out of the crowd
and carried him; symbol of how America was
being invented day by day; war hero choosing a
future literary genius
 Senior Whitman’s sons were named after family
lineage and Revolutionary War heroes; only the
youngest son, Edward, had a name that neither
linked him to the family lineage or American
history. He was mentally handicapped.
Whitman's father was a stern and sometimes
hot-tempered man, maybe an alcoholic,
whom Whitman respected but for whom he
never felt a great deal of affection; mother was
an emotional touchstone
 Brother Jesse became mentally unstable;
sister Hannah married an abusive husband;
brother Andrew married a prostitute and died
in his 30’s
 His family moved frequently around Brooklyn
on the account of his father’s dealings in real
estate
 He loved ferries and the people who worked
on them, and his 1856 poem eventually
entitled “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” explored
the full resonance of the experience. The act of
crossing became, for Whitman, one of the
most evocative events in his life—at once
practical, enjoyable, and mystical. The daily
commute suggested the passage from life to
death to life again and suggested too the
passage from poet to reader to poet via the
vehicle of the poem

 Attended newly founded
public schools; wealthy
children went to private
ones
 Shared classes with
children from various
backgrounds; only African
American children were
not allowed to attend
 Hated the corporal
punishment schools used
to discipline students;
later criticized this in his
journalism
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Most of Whitman's meaningful education
came outside of school, when he visited
museums, went to libraries, and attended
lectures.
Quaker leader Elias Hicks was the first
lecture Whitman ever heard, and had a
profound impact on his life
Quakerism permeated throughout his life,
and helped him through the loss of his
grandmother. Some tenets of Quakerism
include:
The light of God is in everyone. This is
sometimes translated as there is that of God
in everyone.
Each person can have a direct, personal
relationship with God — there is no need
for a priest or a minister as an intermediary.
Our relationship with God is nurtured by
worship based on silent waiting.
The nature of God is love.

Whitman loved the Long Island shore as
a boy, and alternated between the busy
city life and its countryside. Much of his
poetry shifts between the city and
country landscapes
 Was done with formal education at
age 11
 he began his life as a laborer,
working first as an office boy for
some prominent Brooklyn lawyers,
who gave him a subscription to a
circulating library, where his selfeducation began.
 While most other major writers of
his time enjoyed highly structured,
classical educations at private
institutions, Whitman forged his
own rough and informal curriculum
of literature, theater, history,
geography, music, and archeology
out of the developing public
resources of America's fastest
growing city.
 In 1831, Whitman became an
apprentice on the Long Island
Patriot, a liberal, working-class
newspaper, where he learned the
printing trade and was first exposed
to the excitement of putting words
into print. He was 11.
 In his first article, Whitman expressed his amazement at
how New York had gone from a rural to thriving urban
landscape.
 The rest of his family moved back to the West Hills area in
1833, leaving fourteen-year-old Walt alone in the city—and
learning how to set type under the Patriot's foreman
printer William Hartshorne, Whitman was gaining skills
and experiencing an independence that would mark his
whole career: he would always retain a typesetter's concern
for how his words looked on a page, what typeface they
were dressed in, what effects various spatial arrangements
had, and he would always retain his stubborn
independence, never marrying and living alone for most of
his life.
 Brother Jeff, fourteen years younger than Walt, would
become the sibling he felt closest to, was born in 1833.
 Walt was a journeyman printer and compositor in New
York City. His future career seemed set in the
newspaper and printing trades, but then two of New
York's worst fires wiped out the major printing and
business centers of the city, and, in the midst of a
dismal financial climate, Whitman retreated to rural
Long Island, joining his family at Hempstead in 1836.
As he turned 17, the five-year veteran of the printing
trade was already on the verge of a career change.
 Rebelling against his father’s wishes to work on the
family farm, Walt became a school teacher
 Teaching was therefore an escape but was also clearly a
job he was forced to take in bad economic times, and
some of the unhappiest times of his life were these five
years when he taught school in at least ten different
Long Island towns, rooming in the homes of his
students, teaching three-month terms to large and
heterogeneous classes (some with over eighty
students, ranging in age from five to fifteen, for up to
nine hours a day), getting very little pay, and having to
put up with some very unenlightened people.
 "Never before have I
entertained so low an idea of
the beauty and perfection of
man's nature, never have I
seen humanity in so
degraded a shape, as here,"
he wrote from Woodbury in
1840: "Ignorance, vulgarity,
rudeness, conceit, and
dullness are the reigning
gods of this deuced sink of
despair."
 The little evidence we have of his teaching (mostly
from short recollections by a few former students)
suggests that Whitman employed what were then
progressive techniques—encouraging students to
think aloud rather than simply recite, refusing to
punish by paddling, involving his students in
educational games, and joining his students in
baseball and card games. He did not hesitate to use his
own poems—which he was by this time writing with
some frequency, though they were rhymed,
conventional verses that indicated nothing of the
innovative poetry to come—as texts in his classroom
 By 1841, Whitman's second
career was at an end. He had
interrupted his teaching in
1838 to try his luck at starting
his own newspaper, The
Long Islander
 He bought a press and type
and hired his younger brother
George as an assistant, but,
despite his energetic efforts to
edit, publish, write for, and
deliver the new paper, it
folded within a year, and he
reluctantly returned to the
classroom.
 He decided now to become a fiction writer. Best of all, to
nurture that career, he would need to return to New York
City and re-establish himself in the world of journalism.
 Twenty different magazines published Whitman’s work; his
early stories dealt with child torture within the classroom
and miscegenation, or the mixing of different racial group
through various means, as well as man’s need for vice.
 Franklin Evans; or The Inebriate sold more copies than
anything he ever published
 Whitman’s work was largely concerned with the idea of
temperance, either being because of his father’s alcoholism
or his own while he was an unhappy school teacher. He
remained a prominent journalist while publishing his
fiction.
 In 1842 and 1843 he moved easily in and out of positions (as was then
common among journalists) on an array of newspapers, including, in
addition to the Aurora, the New York Evening Tattler, the New York
Statesman, and the New York Sunday Times. And he wrote on topics
ranging from criticizing how the police rounded up prostitutes to
denouncing Bishop John Hughes for his effort to use public funds to
support parochial schools.
 Whitman left New York in 1845, perhaps because of financial
uncertainty resulting from his fluctuating income. He returned to
Brooklyn and to steadier work in a somewhat less competitive
journalistic environment. Often regarded as a New York City writer, his
residence and professional career in the city actually ended, then, a full
decade before the first appearance of Leaves of Grass. However, even
after his move to Brooklyn, he remained connected to New York: he
shuttled back and forth via the Fulton ferry, and he drew imaginatively
on the city's rich and varied splendor for his subject matter.
 Whitman was a lover of
opera; he frequented them
with his brother Jeff
 Whitman was fascinated
with the idea of the human
body as a musical
instrument
 Whitman once said, after
attending an opera, that
the experience was
powerful enough to initiate
a new era in a person's
development.
 With the death of William Marsh, the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle,
Whitman became chief editor of that paper (he served from March 5,
1846 to January 18, 1848). He dedicated himself to journalism in these
years and published little of his own poetry and fiction. However, he
introduced literary reviewing to the Eagle, and he commented, if often
superficially, on writers such as Carlyle and Emerson, who in the next
decade would have a significant impact on Leaves of Grass.
 For Whitman, to serve the public was to frame issues in accordance
with working class interests—and for Whitman this usually meant
white working class interests.
 He sometimes dreaded slave labor as a "black tide" that could
overwhelm white workingmen.
 Like Lincoln, he consistently
opposed slavery and its further
extension, even while he knew
(again like Lincoln) that the more
extreme abolitionists threatened the
Union itself.
 In a famous incident, Whitman lost
his position as editor of the Eagle
because the publisher, Isaac Van
Anden, as an "Old Hunker," sided
with conservative pro-slavery
Democrats and could no longer
abide Whitman's support of free soil
and the Wilmot Proviso (a legislative
proposal designed to stop the
expansion of slavery into the western
territories).
 On February 9, 1846, Whitman met, between acts of a
performance at the Broadway Theatre in New York, J. E.
McClure, who intended to launch a New Orleans paper, the
Crescent , with an associate, A. H. Hayes. In a stunningly
short time—reportedly in fifteen minutes—McClure struck
a deal with Whitman and provided him with an advance to
cover his travel expenses to New Orleans.
 Whitman's younger brother Jeff , then only fifteen years
old, decided to travel with Walt and work as an office boy
on the paper. The journey—by train, steamboat, and
stagecoach—widened Walt's sense of the country's scope
and diversity, as he left the New York City and Long Island
area for the first time.
 Whatever the nature of his personal attachments in New Orleans, he
certainly encountered a city full of color and excitement. He wandered
the French quarter and the old French market, attracted by "the Indian
and negro hucksters with their wares" and the "great Creole mulatto
woman" who sold him the best coffee he ever tasted.
 Whatever the nature of his personal attachments in New Orleans, he
certainly encountered a city full of color and excitement. He wandered
the French quarter and the old French market, attracted by "the Indian
and negro hucksters with their wares" and the "great Creole mulatto
woman" who sold him the best coffee he ever tasted.
 He was entranced by the intoxicating mix of languages—French and
Spanish and English—in that cosmopolitan city and began to see the
possibilities of a distinctive American culture emerging from the
melding of races and backgrounds (his own fondness for using French
terms may well have derived from his New Orleans stay). He was still
horrified by the seemingly never-ending evil of slavery, however,
during his stay.
 Walt felt wonderfully healthy in
New Orleans, concluding that it
agreed with him better than New
York, but Jeff was often sick with
dysentery, and his illness and
homesickness contributed to their
growing desire to return home. The
final decision, though, was taken
out of the hands of the brothers, as
the Crescent owners exhibited what
Whitman called a "singular sort of
coldness" toward their new editor.
They probably feared that this
northern editor would embarrass
them because of his unorthodox
ideas, especially about slavery.
Whitman's sojourn in New Orleans
lasted only three months.
 Throughout much of the 1840s Whitman wrote
conventional poems
 Whitman had undertaken serious self-education in
the art of poetry, conducted in a typically unorthodox
way—he clipped essays and reviews about leading
British and American writers, and as he studied them
he began to be a more aggressive reader and a more
resistant respondent. His marginalia on these articles
demonstrate that he was learning to write not in the
manner of his predecessors but against them.
 The mystery about Whitman
in the late 1840s is the speed
of his transformation from an
unoriginal and conventional
poet into one who abruptly
abandoned conventional
rhyme and meter and, in
jottings begun at this time,
exploited the odd loveliness
of homely imagery, finding
beauty in the commonplace
but expressing it in an
uncommon way.
 On July 16, 1849, the publisher, health guru, and social reformer
Lorenzo Fowler confirmed Whitman's growing sense of personal
capacity when his phrenological analysis of the poet's head led to a
flattering—and in some ways quite accurate—description of his
character. In addition to bolstering Whitman's confidence, the reading
of the "bumps" on his skull gave him some key vocabulary (like
"amativeness" and "adhesiveness," phrenological terms delineating
affections between and among the sexes) for Leaves of Grass.
Whitman's association with Lorenzo Fowler and his brother Orson
would prove to be of continuing importance well into the 1850s. The
Fowler brothers distributed the first edition of Leaves of Grass,
published the second anonymously, and provided a venue in their
firm's magazine for one of Whitman's self-reviews.
 A pivotal and empowering change came over Whitman
at this time of poetic transformation. His politics—
and especially his racial attitudes—underwent a
profound alteration.
 It appears that Whitman's increasing frustration with
the Democratic party's compromising approaches to
the slavery crisis led him to continue his political
efforts through the more subtle and indirect means of
experimental poetry, a poetry that he hoped would be
read by masses of average Americans and would
transform their way of thinking.
 His notebook breaks into free verse for the first time in
lines that seek to bind opposed categories, to link black
and white, to join master and slave:
I am the poet of the body
And I am the poet of the soul
I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters
And I will stand between the masters and the slaves,
Entering into both so that both shall understand me alike.
 The audacity of that final line remains striking. While most
people were lining up on one side or another, Whitman
placed himself in that space—sometimes violent,
sometimes erotic, always volatile—between master and
slave.
 "I" became the main
character of Leaves of
Grass , the explosive
book of twelve untitled
poems that he wrote in
the early years of the
1850s, and for which he
set some of the type,
designed the cover, and
carefully oversaw all the
details.
 When Whitman wrote "I, now thirty-six years
old, in perfect health, begin," he announced a
new identity for himself, and his novitiate came
at an age quite advanced for a poet. Keats by
that age had been dead for ten years; Byron had
died at exactly that age; Wordsworth and
Coleridge produced Lyrical Ballads while both
were in their twenties; Bryant had written
"Thanatopsis," his best-known poem, at age
sixteen; and most other great Romantic poets
Whitman admired had done their most
memorable work early in their adult lives.
 The mystery that has intrigued
biographers and critics over the
years has been about what
prompted the transformation: did
Whitman undergo some sort of
spiritual illumination that opened
the floodgates of a radical new
kind of poetry, or was this poetry
the result of an original and
carefully calculated strategy to
blend journalism, oratory, popular
music, and other cultural forces
into an innovative American voice
like the one Ralph Waldo Emerson
had called for in his essay "The
Poet"?
 We know very little about the details of Whitman's life in
the early 1850s; it is as if he retreated from the public world
to receive inspiration, and there are relatively few
remaining manuscripts of the poems in the first edition of
Leaves, leading many to believe that they emerged in a fury
of inspiration.
 On the other hand, the manuscripts that do remain
indicate that Whitman meticulously worked and reworked
passages of his poems, heavily revising entire drafts of the
poems, and that he issued detailed instructions to the
Rome brothers, the printers who were setting his book in
type, carefully overseeing every aspect of the production of
his book.
 Whitman paid out of his own pocket for the production of the
first edition of his book and had only 795 copies printed, which
he bound at various times as his finances permitted.
 His joy at getting the book published was quickly diminished by
the death of his father a few weeks after the appearance of
Leaves. This left Walt Jr. in charge.
 He had already had some experience enacting that role even
while Walter Sr. was alive; perhaps because of Walter Sr.'s
drinking habits and growing general depression, young Walt had
taken on a number of adult responsibilities—buying boots for
his brothers, for instance, and holding the title to the family
house as early as 1847. Now, however, he became the only person
his mother and siblings could turn to.
 Even though Whitman claimed
that the first edition sold out,
the book in fact had very poor
sales.
 Though it was no secret who the
author of Leaves of Grass was,
the fact that Whitman did not
put his name on the title page
was an unconventional and
suggestive act (his name would
in fact not appear on a title page
of Leaves until the 1876
"Author's Edition" of the book,
and then only when Whitman
signed his name on the title page
as each book was sold). He was
truly “America’s” poet.
 Whitman would continually add the “Leaves” until his
death in on March 26, 1892.
 Whitman worked as a nurse during the Civil War, and
wrote many poems reflecting on his experiences during
this time.
 Whitman was a Union sympathizer; he felt Lincoln was a
great hero, and writes one of his most famous poems about
his assassination, When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard
Bloom’d
 He took a job as a clerk for the Department of the Interior,
which ended when the Secretary of the Interior, James
Harlan, discovered that Whitman was the author of Leaves
of Grass, which Harlan found offensive. Harlan fired the
poet.
 Whitman struggled to
support himself through
most of his life. In
Washington, he lived on a
clerk's salary and modest
royalties, and spent any
excess money, including
gifts from friends, to buy
supplies for the patients he
nursed and to support his
invalid brother and
mother.
 After suffering a stroke, Whitman found it impossible
to return to Washington. He stayed with his brother
until the 1882 publication of Leaves of Grass gave
Whitman enough money to buy a home in Camden.
 In the simple two-story clapboard house, Whitman
spent his declining years working on additions and
revisions to a new edition of the book and preparing
his final volume of poems and prose, Good-Bye, My
Fancy (1891). After his death on March 26, 1892,
Whitman was buried in a tomb he designed and had
built on a lot in Harleigh Cemetery.